As it stands there is no good way for a project to release outside of a simultaneous release. Going forward, we should provide tools (JJB templates?) to complete a release and publish it to a staging repository where it can be promoted to actually released (by LF staff or should projects have that permission too?). Also, we need to have tools or very good documentation to explain how to then do reasonable version bumps to prevent conflicts in SNAPSHOT repos on nexus.

As part of that, release jobs (and autorelease) should produce csv files of all released artifacts with groupId, artifactId, and version which can be used for projects to target that (auto)release job's run for their dependencies.

Beyond that, we probably also want tools to allow for a project to target a set of (auto)release jobs output as their dependencies. This should allow for a project to become "compatible with" a given release after the fact. For example to be compatible with a run of autorelease despite not participating in that simultaneous release.

This last part probably amounts to a tool that takes a list of csv files and the replaces any versions for those artifacts in pom.xml and features.xml files in a subdirectory with those in the csv files and then makes sure that the only SNAPHSHOT version files are for the right groupId.